Consequence of Sounds - Regina Spektor

My rhyme ain't good just yet,
My brain and tongue just met,
And they ain't friends, so far,
My words don't travel far,
They tangle in my hair,
And tend to go nowhere,
They grow right back inside,
Right past my brain and eyes
Into my stomach juice
Where they don't serve much use,
No healthy calories,
Nutrition values.
And I absorb back in
The words right through my skin
They sit there festering inside my bowels

The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds
The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds

Got a soundtrack in my mind,
All the time. Kids-
Screamin' from too much beat up
And they don't even rhyme,
They just stand there, on a street corner,
Skin tucked in
And meat side out and shot,
And I'd like to turn them down
But there ain't no knob.
Run into picket fences
Not into picket lines.
All this hippie-shit for the 60's
And another cliche for our time. But,
But a one of these days your heart
Will just stop ticking,
And they sorta just don't find you till your cubicle is reeking.

The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds
The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds
Ahh ah ah ah ahh ah ah ah

Did you know that the gravedigger's still
Gettin' stuck in the machine
Even tough it's a whole other daydream.
It's another town it's another world,
Where the kids are asleep, where the loans are paid
And the lawns are mowed.
Whad'ya think?
All the gravediggers were gone?
Just cause one song is done
There's always another one,
Waiting right around the bend,
Till this one ends,
Then it begins
Squeaky clean, then it starts all over again.

The weather report keeps on
Tossing and turning,
Predicting and warning,
And warning and warning of,
Possible leakage from news publications and,
Possible leakage from news TV stations.
That very same morning right next to her coffee
She noticed some bleeding and heard hollow coughing and
National Geographic was being too graphic,
When all she had wanted to know was the traffic
"The worlds got a nosebleed" it said
"And we're flooding but we keep on cutting
The trees and the forests!"
And we keep on paying those freaks on the TV,
Who claim they will save us but want to enslave us.
And sweating like demons they scream through our speakers
But we leave the sound on 'cause silence is harder.
And no one's the killer and no one's the martyr
The world that has made us can no longer contain us
And profits are silent then rotting away 'cause

The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds.
The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds.
Ah ah ah...

My rhyme ain't good just yet,
My brain and tongue just met,
And they ain't friends, so far,
My words don't travel far,
They tangle in my hair,
And tend to go nowhere,
They grow right back inside,
Right past my brain and eyes
Into my stomach juice
Where they don't serve much use,
No healthy calories,
Nutrition values.
And I absorb back in
The words right through my skin
They sit there festering inside my bowels

The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds
The consonants and vowels
The consequence of sounds 

Critical Run Sydney

Critical Run Sydney is an art critique series with the purpose of campaigning to bring the widely acclaimed Emergency Room exhibition format to Sydney.

Emergency Room is an exhibition format created by Danish/French conceptual artist Thierry Geoffroy. Its purpose is to create a space where artists can contribute daily to current social debate. Free of proposals and waiting lists, Emergency Room allows artists to respond to todays issues immediately by providing a free space to exhibit.

Part of the Emergency Room format is a certain perfected system and savoir faire executed and taught to the collaborating artists by the ER staff. Punctuality is a keystone when the artwork of yesterday daily at 12.30 p.m. is removed from the Emergency Room to give space to the artwork of today. This ritual is called “The Passage” and is the central element of the constant changing Emergency Room. Some days 20 artist will turn up for the Passage, other days only 10. On rare occasions the alerting apathy of people is proven by nobody showing up. Other days the news of the day will start a storm of reactions from outraged or thrilled artists, creating a creative explosion of awareness to be witnessed by all the lucky visitors and media present at the time of the Passage. Here the true energetic symbiosis of the artist as representative of the public opinion is revealed and fed back into the media channels.

Critical Run Sydney are hosting a series of Critical Runs over the next couple of months. After the innaugral run over the Harbour Bridge last Saturday, they're repeating the format this Saturday afternoon on the timely topic: Is social media ruining our lives? They're meeting at 3pm at the corner of Oxford St and Crown St and running down Crown Street to Cleveland St, Surry Hills. Run starts at 3:30pm sharp.

For more information on Critical Run Sydney head to the Emergency Room website, check out the Critical Run Sydney facebook page, or email the Critical Run Sydney team at micromergency@gmail.com

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Pisco Sin Fronteras - Burners Without Borders

Pisco Sin Fronteras - Burners Without Borders from Kelly y Jefe on Vimeo.

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

Hereafter - Parallel Lions

Long day
into a long night
Someway
through my life
Found you,
cold street,
cold hands,
cold feet.
You were so pale,
so lost
and lonely.
You said
“Someday,
someone
is gonna want me”.

I tried to save your life,
but you’re always on the edge of it

And every little comfort I found in you,
I’m becoming less of myself it’s true.
I don’t want to stumble in your hereafter.
I ask about the places that you have been.
You tumble into silence, silence, silence.
.. and you,
talking isn’t something you do.

Long day
into long night.
Someway
through your life
You say,
“No way,
no one
could ever want me”

I tried to save your life,
but you’re always on the edge of it.

And every little comfort I found in you,
I’m becoming less of myself it’s true.
I don’t want to stumble in your hereafter.
I ask about the people that you’ve been seeing.
You tumble into silence, silence, silence.
… and you,
talking isn’t something you do.

We’re becoming less of ourselves it’s true.
You tumble into silence, silence, silence.
… and you, talking isn’t something you do.


http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

"Rights without duties, claims without responsibilities and pleasure without cost".

Roger Scruton is a man of many (often questionable) faces, but in this case, but I'm partially sympathetic to the way he summarises the total absence of critical reason in the psychedelic worldview which arose in the 60's - an aberration which for me devalues the potential generative possibilities of psychedelic research (e.g. MAPS).  Given the last couple of posts, you can't half tell how I'm wearing away at these questions for myself at the moment...

"If the value of LSD is that it expresses and brings to fruition what was going on in the 60's, then I think that's a strong argument against LSD - becasue what was going on the 60's is something that I believe we now have to recover from. It is very difficult to summarise the 60's worldview, but I think one could say very briefly in a nutshell it was the attempt to have rights without duties, claims without responsibilities and pleasure without cost.  The real cost of having any peaceful enjoyment of the world is that one maintains institutions - one makes a sacrifice to preserve one's inheritance.  This was something that the young people of the 60's were reluctant to do, and LSD ministered to that reluctance.  It told them that even the most sublime experiences, the ones of religion - which people had thought in the past came through considerable sacrifice, worship and surrender - that even that experience could be had on the cheap...

... whatever the actual intensity of the experience, to call it religious has nothing to do with it's intensity, it's to interpret it as having a certain meaning.  When you administer to yourself a drug which you know is affecting you by producing a chemical transformation in the brain, and you're deliberately engineering that, it's very difficult to sincerely interpret this as a visitation of the divine spirit or the revelation of a transcendental world.  It's simply an act of self-deception to put that kind of religious kind of interpretation on it, I'd have thought".

- Roger Scruton

I think it's important to note that Scruton doesn't deny the existence of a transcendental perspective.  This from Wikipedia:

"Scruton is indebted to the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom he credits with providing the definitive philosophical response to Descartes' view of consciousness. Mark Dooley compares his Wittgenstein-influenced philosophy of language to that of Richard Rorty. Scruton contends, following Immanuel Kant, that human beings have a transcendental dimension, a sacred core exhibited in their capacity for self-reflection".

"... a dedication to a way of life which can indeed be very much reinforced by experience, but experience isn't the point of it"

"Taking drugs to get into the presence of God is barging into the presence of God. If you just go and have an experience, you're simply not equipped to recognise the experience for what it is and to react to it in the right way. So for that reason, no, I wouldn't take drugs - there's so much more to religion, indeed almost everything more to religion than having experience, it's a dedication to a way of life which can indeed be very much reinforced by experience, but experience isn't the point of it"

- Professor Richard Swinburne.

More fascinations from Steppenwolf

"There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.

It was in such a mood then that I finished this not intolerable and very ordinary day as dusk set in. I did not end it in a manner becoming a rather ailing man and go to bed tempted by a hot water bottle. Instead I put on my shoes ill-humoredly, discontented and disgusted with the little work I had done, and went out into the dark and foggy streets to drink what men according to an old convention call "a glass of wine," at the sign of the Steel Helmet.

So I went down the stairs from my room in the attic, those difficult stairs of this alien world, those thoroughly bourgeois, well-swept and scoured stairs of a very respectable three-family apartment house under whose roof I have my refuge. I don't know how it comes about, but I, the homeless Steppenwolf, the solitary, the hater of life's petty conventions, always take up my quarters in just such houses as this. It is an old weakness of mine. I live neither in palatial houses nor in those of the humble poor, but instead and deliberately in these respectable and wearisome and spotless middle-class homes, which smell of turpentine and soap and where there is a panic if you bang the door or come in with dirty shoes. The love of this atmosphere comes, no doubt, from the days of my childhood, and a secret yearning I have for something homelike drives me, though with little hope, to follow the same old stupid road. Then again, I like the contrast between my lonely, loveless, hunted, and thoroughly disorderly existence and this middle-class family life. I like to breathe in on the stairs this odor of quiet and order, of cleanliness and respectable domesticity. There is something in it that touches me in spite of my hatred for all it stands for. I like to step across the threshold of my room where all this suddenly stops; where, instead, cigar ash and wine bottles lie among the heaped-up books and there is nothing but disorder and neglect; and where everything--books, manuscript, thoughts--is marked and saturated with the plight of lonely men, with the problem of existence and with the yearning after a new orientation for an age that has lost its bearings".

A View From The Top - NightWalkers Blue Mountains Wild Endurance Training Walk

http://www.thepresentparticiple.blogspot.com

More pearls from Steppenwolf

"These horrors were really nonexistent. A man of the Middle Ages would
detest the whole mode of our present-day life as something far more
than horrible, far more than barbarous. Every age, every culture,
every custom and tradition has its own character, its own weakness and
its own strength, its beauties and ugliness; accepts certain
sufferings as matters of course, puts up patiently with certain evils.
Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages,
two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical Age who had
to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as a savage
does in the midst of our civilisation. Now there are times when a
whole generation is caught in this way between two ages, two modes of
life, with the consequence that it loses all power to understand
itself and has no standard, no security, no simple acquiescence.
Naturally, every one does not feel this equally strongly. A nature
such as Nietzsche's had to suffer our present ills more than a
generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and
misunderstood, thousands suffer today."

One of many brilliant passages from Steppenwolf

I'm having a second crack at Steppenwolf, and today again came across this old passage which blew me away the first time I read it:

"I have already given some account of the Steppenwolf's outward appearance. He gave at the very first glance the impression of a significant, an uncommon, and unusually gifted man. His face was intellectual, and the abnormally delicate and mobile play of his features reflected a soul of extremely emotional and unusually delicate sensibility. When one spoke to him and he, as was not always the case, dropped conventionalities and said personal and individual things that came out of his own alien world, then a man like myself came under his spell on the spot. He had thought more than other men, and in matters of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down, or to appear always in the right.

I remember an instance of this in the last days he was here, if I can call a mere fleeting glance he gave me an example of what I mean. It was when a celebrated historian, philosopher, and critic, a man of European fame, had announced a lecture in the school auditorium. I had succeeded in persuading the Steppenwolf to attend it, though at first he had little desire to do so. We went together and sat next to each other in the lecture hall. When the lecturer ascended the platform and began his address, many of his hearers, who had expected a sort of prophet, were disappointed by his rather dapper appearance and conceited air. And when he proceeded, by way of introduction, to say a few flattering things to the audience, thanking them for their attendance in such numbers, the Steppenwolf threw me a quick look, a look which criticized both the words and the speaker of them--an unforgettable and frightful look which spoke volumes! It was a look that did not simply criticize the lecturer, annihilating the famous man with its delicate but crushing irony. That was the least of it. It was more sad than ironical; it was indeed utterly and hopelessly sad; it conveyed a quiet despair, born partly of conviction, partly of a mode of thought which had become habitual with him. This despair of his not only unmasked the conceited lecturer and dismissed with its irony the matter at hand, the expectant attitude of the public, the somewhat presumptuous title under which the lecture was announced--no, the Steppenwolf's look pierced our whole epoch, its whole overwrought activity, the whole surge and strife, the whole vanity, the whole superficial play of a shallow, opinionated intellectuality. And alas! the look went still deeper, went far below the faults, defects and hopelessness of our time, our intellect, our culture alone. It went right to the heart of all humanity, it bespoke eloquently in a single second the whole despair of a thinker, of one who knew the full worth and meaning of man's life. It said: "See what monkeys we are! Look, such is man!" and at once all renown, all intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards the sublime, the great and the enduring in man fell away and became a monkey's trick!"